Saying No

Editor’s Note: Jane Says is a column that features personal essays and book excerpts by women writers. If you would like to submit a non-fiction piece for Jane Says send pitches to seejanewritemag@gmail.com. In the following excerpt, Susan Schorn practices the art of saying “no.” Women writers must learn to say “no,” for the sake of our sanity and for the sake of our art. We won’t have time to say “yes” to writing if we say “yes” to everyone and everything else.  

By Susan Schorn

It wasn’t until several months into my [self-defense] training … that I received the full impact of Sensei Suzanne’s approach.

I remember feeling like a complete idiot.

I was just doing as instructed: Looking at the woman across from me—whom I had never met—listening to her ask me questions, and responding to her with “No.”

That’s all I was saying. I was not allowed to say anything else. I was also not allowed to smile, laugh, look away, or move from where I was standing.

I was doggedly not doing any of those things because Sensei Suzanne had told me I needed to attend a self-defense workshop in order to be promoted to yellow belt. And when Sensei told you that you needed to do something, it was rather like having a doctor tell you that you need to put your affairs in order. You didn’t waste time asking questions. So there I was, on a lovely, sunny June day, in a dark musty warehouse, saying “no” to a complete stranger.

I had been training at Sun Dragon for about half a year at that point, and I’d found that the physical skills came in handy pretty often outside the dojo, whether I was trying to open a stuck fire door (a front thrust kick near the handle) or exit a crowded elevator (a gentle palm-heel block into the small of the back). I was not convinced that I needed an additional five hours of instruction in how to fend off potential rapists or subway gropers. I could beat up all kinds of people, I figured. Why bother specializing?

The rest of the women in attendance were not karate students. They were college girls and housewives and divorcees who wanted basic training in self defense. Most of them had filed into the dojo nervously, looking around at the targets and mats, wondering how much punching and kicking would be expected of them. I’m sure they were expecting one of those classes where they dress a guy up in enough padding to make him look like the Michelin Man and then let everyone kick him in the groin for a while.

Instead, we spent the opening hour talking about how to stand, walk, and look at people. I was accustomed to doing peculiar things in Sensei Suzanne’s karate classes, but I was just as surprised by this as everyone else. I had assumed the workshop would be a slightly less strenuous version of what we did in karate—a little role playing, some target striking, probably an extra round of groin work. I hadn’t anticipated that it would involve such exquisite discomfort on my part. I wouldn’t have minded physical pain. In fact I would have preferred it.

My partner in this particular exercise was obviously as uncomfortable as I was, but she kept gamely asking questions, following one of the scenarios Sensei Suzanne had suggested: “Do you have change for a dollar? Can I have a quarter to make a phone call? For bus fare? Can you give me a ride? Why not? Don’t you like me? What’s the matter with you?”

“No,” I told her. “No. No. No. No. No. No.”

This would have been boring if the embarrassment weren’t so agonizing. “I hate this,” I thought; “I hate it so much I can feel it physically.” The sensation of saying “No” to another person’s face made me writhe internally, and it took all my energy not to squirm. Since I couldn’t say anything but “No,” I didn’t have a lot of decision-making to do, so I could at least think about whatever I pleased. What I thought was: “Why in God’s name am I doing this? I already know about self defense. I can break boards with my bare hands, and I’m sure I could break bones too. And I know how to say ‘No.'”

Knowing how to do something is different from actually doing it. It occurred to me, somewhere around my twentieth “No,” that I had probably said the word more times in the preceding half-minute than I had in the preceding month. I thought back over all the times I could have said “No” and didn’t—to the student who made a Friday afternoon office appointment to come in and complain about the grade I’d given her on a paper (and then never showed up); to the woman at the post office who asked if she could cut in line in front of me (leaving everyone behind me seething); to the nice young Mormons outside the library who asked if I could spare a few moments of my time to talk about God. I wanted to say no to all of them, and I didn’t.

I kept looking at my partner, but I thought about those other people, and saying “No” started to feel a little easier.

“No,” I told her when she asked if I knew what time it was; “No,” when she asked if I had a spare cigarette. It started to feel like the perfect weapon, this single syllable; or perhaps a shield is a better way to put it. The questions came at me from all angles, but the same word deflected and defused all of them. No. Repeated over and over, without explanation, without placating gestures, without apology, it formed an unassailable verbal wall made of just one brick, one tiny word: No.

When sixty seconds had passed (it felt like sixty minutes), and Sensei Suzanne said, “Okay, you can stop,” I no longer felt like an idiot. I probably still looked like one, but I didn’t care anymore.

Then my partner and I switched roles, and I had to ask inane questions for sixty seconds while she said “No” to me. Here again, I wasn’t allowed to smile, and I wasn’t allowed to look away (nor was I allowed to threaten her; we had to wait until Hour Four to do that). All I could do was ask her for something.

This, I discovered, was even more agonizing than saying “No.” Because, as I had just discovered, “No” is quite a powerful word. If we appreciated how powerful it was, we’d use it a lot more often. We’re conditioned to respect it. Every time my partner told me “No,” it got harder to ask the next question. It made me feel bad. Not just rude, or aware that she didn’t like me. It made me feel like a bad person, like I ought to be ashamed.

And that started me thinking about the mindset of people who keep asking for things, in normal life, even after people tell them “No.”

I always thought of them as annoying—the pushy guys in bars, the aggressive panhandlers, the telemarketers. But if they can keep asking me for something even when they know I don’t want them to, well . . .

Wow, those people are assholes. And they deserve to be told “No,” and not a single thing more.

Susan Schorn holds black belts in Kyokushin and Seido karate and is currently working toward self-defense instructor certification. She writes for McSweeney’s and The Rumpus and lives in Austin, Texas.

Excerpted from Smile at Strangers: And Other Lessons in the Art of Living Fearlessly by Susan Schorn. Copyright © 2013 by Susan Schorn. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.